Blayne Haggart's Orangespace

In which the MIDP finally pushes me over the edge and I unexpectedly reach the point where I’d read enough to render a verdict on the entire report.

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries and relevant documents available here

I really didn’t think it would be the mobility section that finally sent me over the edge.

Part 5: Improving Mobility Management (pp. 84-91)

Goal 1: Establish a new entity to coordinate the entire mobility system (pp. 86-88)

New bureaucracy alert: The Waterfront Transportation Management Association (WTMA) would be responsible for coordinating “the transportation system in the IDEA district by deploying a mobility management system.” (pp. 84-85) It would not have much of an effect at the Quayside level. (p. 85)

Its roles:

• Creating a mobility subscription package
• Deploying a holistic mobility management system
• Managing and setting prices for the curbside and parking systems
• Procuring and operating new technologies, such as adaptive traffic signals, dynamic pavement, freight and deliveries, or other third-party systems and apps
• Integrating systems with third-party navigation apps
• Allocating space across the needs of mobility, access, safety, and the public realm
• Reporting on performance targets related to congestion, mode share, and customer service (p. 86)

Financing:

• Financing: should be self-sustaining.
• Suggested financing sources: many, many types of fees for using mobility services in the District, and “charges for mobility services to residents and employees.”

This listing of responsibilities and some vague thoughts on financing, again, is not a plan; it’s an idea, a notion. These proposed funding suggestions are just kind of thrown out there, the report version of spitballing. Whether they would end up being sufficient is left unexamined, in what seems to be a particularly half-baked proposal (How many people would be required to run this entity? Are they unionized? How much would this all cost? How much money would be required for it to be “self-sustaining”?).

Also, why is the Eastern Waterfront a sufficient scale for this administrative agency, which is being asked to do a whole lot of specialized work? That the Eastern Waterfront just happens to be the right scale for a WTMA seems awfully convenient, especially since Sidewalk Labs would effectively be creating a new agency for what is – let’s not forget – a pretty small piece of land in the context of Toronto itself.

Moving on (ha), what would this vague notion of an agency do?

Develop specific guidelines (p. 87);

• “Oversee planning, operations and maintenance” of all roads, hardware and software for parking, curb and traffic management
• Set and enforce parking, curbside and road usage fees
• Set speed limits
• Manage street closures for construction or events
• Handle data properly
• Create that trip-planning interface/app Sidewalk Labs is all keen for
• Snow and debris clearing “beyond heated pavement”
• Constructing and financing roads or parking facilities.
• Run the “advanced mobility management system”

Those are a hell of a lot of responsibilities. It will involve workers that had to do both physical labour and maintain complex IT systems, systems that are much, much more complex than anything Toronto has today, in part because everything is interconnected.

And yet Sidewalk Labs throws all this out there without any attempt to cost it out, or to explain exactly who (in terms of actual people) is going to do this work.

If you look closely, you can actually pinpoint the exact moment where my brain breaks

I’ve been trying to keep my writing breezy and loose, in part to keep my interest up in what has become a very long slog, but I’ve also been trying to keep my objectivity about what Sidewalk Labs is proposing. When I began reading the MIDP, I had a lot of reasons to doubt the quality of this project, many of which I’ve detailed over several posts, but I really did try to keep in mind that I could be wrong. Change isn’t necessarily bad.

But this section finally broke me. To cavalierly propose what would almost certainly end up being a multi-million-dollar agency to govern a couple hundred acres, without even trying to cost out the proposal, or to think through how it would be staffed… it’s a joke.

Sidewalk Labs was supposed to present a plan. A plan implies an idea about what you will do, and how you will do it. It implies details. And we get … this?

The WTMA is not a serious proposal. It is a repository for all the things that need to happen for their Rube Goldberg-esque plan to work.

The MIDP is not a serious document. It’s a sales job put out by company that will say anything to get this project across the finish line. It scatters information about its various components throughout the document. Sidewalk Labs sees the WTMA as a subsidiary part of an overarching administrative body, which may or may not be Waterfront Toronto, but whose capacities in any case do not currently exist.

And we get this information stated clearly only in Volume 3 (page 70), 1,320 pages into the MIDP and 456 pages beyond this section, which should have been the comprehensive discussion of this organization.

And that list above, of what the WTMA would do? Notice how it includes “Manage street closures for construction or events”? Well, here’s what Sidewalk Labs writes on page 11 of “Mobility Technical Appendix F: Mobility Management” – that’s right, Sidewalk Labs, someone is reading your appendices, even though they’re not included with the main report:

The WTMA is not envisioned to do the following things … Manage street closures —to be done by Transportation Services… . (emphasis added because, just, wow)

So, like, whatever. Part of me – the professional part that’s offended by the half-assedness of a report that could win the company that produced it company billions of dollars and some of the most valuable undeveloped real estate in North America – cannot believe how incompetent Sidewalk Labs is at what should be its specialties: keeping their story straight and putting their best foot forward.

The researcher part of me, however, is not surprised. This type of clumsiness and lack of attention to detail has characterized Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto adventure from the very beginning, from the early insistence that a YMCA day camp counts as consultation to the fast-and-loose way they’ve played with data governance.

Welcome to gridlock, population Sidewalk Labs

Oh! And just to show that Sidewalk Labs is truly not serious about this proposal, the WTMA – not the overarching authority, but the agency responsible for plowing the roads, maintaining the software, closing off roads for block parties and collecting fees “would include a steering committee with representatives from all three orders of government” (Volume 3, p. 70).

WHY???? Why saddle such an entity with this type of governance? As the Auditor General’s report makes clear, it’s this tripartite decision-making capability that has hampered Waterfront Toronto’s mission to develop the waterfront. And Sidewalk Labs wants to duplicate this dysfunction AT THE OPERATIONAL LEVEL?

It makes no sense whatsoever. If you’re going to continue to have tripartite responsibility for this area, you keep it at the policy level, with line agencies disposing of the policy-level’s proposals. Stupid dumb.

What makes this proposal even worse, is this silly nod toward a tripartite steering committee represents the extent of Sidewalk Labs’ discussion of this multi-million-dollar entity. That’s it.

It’s irresponsible. It’s ridiculous.

This idiotic WTMA proposal has all the hallmarks of a proposal made by an organization that is making this stuff up as they go along, that is willing to say anything to get their project across the finish line, hoping that nobody reads their convoluted, overlong and repetitive, index-free proposal too closely.

Rendering a verdict

This WTMA proposal exposes the MIDP for what it is: a cynical scheme that disrespects the many Torontonians who take the development of their waterfront seriously and only want the best for their city.

Very Serious Torontonians can pretend that this proposal is anything other than a poorly conceived land and power grab by Sidewalk Labs and Google, but the rest of us are under no obligation to take this charade seriously.

This project may very well come to pass, via a process that has been marred by irregularities from the very beginning. But that won’t change the fact that this is a poorly thought out proposal not worthy of serious consideration. If implemented, Toronto will rue the day Will Fleissig and Waterfront Toronto invited Google to town.

I’m out. At this point, 871 pages into this repetitive monstrosity, there’s very little left to learn. I’m going to continue to analyze the MIDP, and I may do another post on Waterfront Toronto’s Note to Reader, and a final summary post, but I’ve read more than enough to come to a conclusion about whether the MIDP is a sound proposal.

It’s not.

I began writing this series in order to understand Sidewalk Labs Master Innovation and Development Plan, and now I do: There is no plan; there is only a sales pitch.

The Emperor has no clothes. There is no need to pretend otherwise.

Goal 2: Deploy a real- time mobility management system (pp. 89-91)

Part 6: Designing People-First Streets (pp. 92-107)

Goal 1: Create four new types of streets to move people and make places (pp. 96-107)

Public Engagement (pp. 108-115)

Discusses feedback from the public. As with the other mentions of public engagement in this Volume, we can’t see whether the selected views are representative. At least one Reference Panel member suggests that this feedback is not representative and the product of a tightly managed process.

On substantive analysis, and some incredibly sloppy data reporting that raises questions about Sidewalk Labs’ quality control and makes this former StatsCan editor (The Daily and Infomat, publications, back in the day) very sad.

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries and relevant documents available here

This is it! The final post for Volume 1! Only … sigh … two more volumes to go.

Part 3: Measuring Impact (pp. 494-503)

At this point, over 70 pages into Chapter 3, what stands out about a chapter that is supposed to be all about “Economic Development,” is the lack of actual or sophisticated economic analysis. Most of it is a restatement of the swell proposals Sidewalk Labs has made elsewhere, in the overview and in Volume 1. Sidewalk Labs has touted its urbanMetrics’ report, but there’s not much of urbanMetrics in here. Instead, the preceding economic analysis – such as it was – was based mostly on anecdotes.

All this to say that the chapter so far has been 70 pages of filler. What do the final ten pages hold?

Both more and less than what we’ve already seen.

In a just world, these ten pages would have stood on their own (also the preceding text would not have repeated every single point a dozen times). These ten pages detail the findings of the urbanMetrics report (almost all of which we’ve already seen), but they don’t break out the individual contributors to growth (e.g., the timber factory).

The analysis is at such a high level (and is dependent on Sidewalk Labs’ own data and projections) that they don’t help us answer the big questions, such as: what do the individual components of this project contribute to the overall picture, both statically and dynamically?

On a related point, urbanMetrics’s report is an analysis of Sidewalk Labs’ best-case scenario, in which nothing at all goes wrong. So, these numbers should be treated as the absolute upper bound of what is possible. Actual results will almost certainly be lower than what’s predicted here.

This section brings us to just over halfway through the entire report. As hard as it is to believe, we’re closer to the end than the beginning. Right now, the thought that there might be life beyond the MIDP is the only think that keeps me going.

Impact 1: Spurring the creation of 44,000 direct jobs and 93,000 total jobs (pp. 496-499; not listed in Table of Contents)

I’m just going to be reporting the numbers here. I’m not going to be putting them in a larger context regarding whether they’re realistic (i.e., the proportion of jobs predicted versus actual job growth). That would be very useful to do, but I’d like this project to end before the sun explodes.

For those of you who want to do that, use your best judgment. If Sidewalk Labs claims that the area will contribute a disproportionate amount to either job creation or GDP, that’ll tell you that their numbers aren’t trustworthy.

So, here’s what urbanMetrics’ model, using Sidewalk Labs-provided inputs:

• 44,100 direct jobs in the entire Eastern Waterfront by 2040, a large proportion of which would be in professional and scientific and technical services
  • 2,500 industrial jobs (light manufacturing, transportation)
  • “Population-based services,” an odd term encompassing everything from doctors to retail and which doesn’t seem to be used in the urbanMetrics report: 12,000 jobs
  • Knowledge-based industries, which they define as “technology, finance, professional services, and creative fields, including the film industry”: 29,000
• 49,000 more jobs by 2040 throughout the country.
• an average wage increase to $70,000 (IDEA District), compared to projected $60,000 (Eastern Waterfront? – I wasn’t able to find these specific figures in the urbanMetrics report, but I might’ve missed it. It sure would’ve been nice if Sidewalk Labs had provided some page references. This number seems to come from a simple averaging of current average industry incomes (p. 497), so it might not even be mentioned in the report.)

A couple of things (leaving the heavy lifting to others):

I tried breaking out exactly what types of employment Sidewalk Labs believes they will be generating, because it’s a bit weird to lump doctors and sales clerks into the same category. What follows is from the urbanMetrics report (p. 51). It includes 2,500 “work at home” jobs that are excluded from the 44,100 number reported by Sidewalk Labs (44,200 in the actual report):

Assumed Employment Composition by Industry, by 2040, Sidewalk Labs Version

Source: urbanMetrics Inc., Sidewalk Toronto Economic Impact Analysis, p. 51.

For some, this might be a bit too inside-baseball, but it’s best practice to ensure that others can figure out how you calculated your numbers (#transparency). Using a composite category, “population-based services,” once in the report, on a single page, without making clear what the underlying components of this category actually are, and reporting two different employment numbers (a total at-home-work-excluding and a disaggregation that includes at-home work) isn’t cool. It’s sloppy. If you’re a company asking people to give you a multi-billion-dollar contract like this one, raising questions about basic competence is not a good look.

Impact 2: Nearly seven times the potential annual GDP impact (pp. 500-501; not listed in Table of Contents)

The Toronto firm urbanMetrics estimates that the growing global profile of the IDEA District could generate an estimated $14.2 billion in economic output for Canada each year (GDP), including $11.8 billion in Toronto, which represents a more than six-fold increase in value added to the Canadian economy compared to status quo development by 2040. (p. 500)

So, I used to work copyediting tables at Statistics Canada.

Sidewalk Labs: you have a typo in the second column of row 1 on page 501: $11,769,431,015 should be $11,769,431,016.

Moving on, this $11.8 billion of annual GDP for Toronto would be equivalent to about 3.5% of its 2014 GDP.

Impact 3: The largest city building project in North America (pp. 502-503; not listed in Table of Contents)

This section highlights the project’s effects on construction. All I’ll note that it’s depending on an unproven technology – factory-made timber skyscrapers.

Part 4: Exploring Economic Impact Further into the Future (pp. 504-515)

This section continues the imagineering, wondering what could be done if these developments led to the development of even more waterfront land, with a brief detour into the Bloor Viaduct.

One final note: the further out one’s predictions go, the less reliable they become. Fittingly, the world “could” does a lot of work in Part 4.

And with that, we’re finished Volume 1: The Plans. Next up: Volume 2: The Innovations. I’m hoping for less repetition because it would be nice to read something substantive. But also more repetition, because this project is soul-destroying.

Sidewalk Labs provides some reasons why they need all this special treatment. And more. Always more.

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries and relevant documents available here

We’re still on Chapter 3 of Volume 1, so let’s get right to it.

Part 2: Sparking a Cluster in Urban Innovation (pp. 460-493)

Introduction (pp. 462-465; not listed in Table of Contents)

In which Sidewalk Labs makes a pitch for urban innovation as a growing economic sector (p. 464).

Strategy 1: Invest in a cluster-based approach (pp. 466-469; not listed in Table of Contents)

Here at least we get Sidewalk Labs’ response to my earlier question about why they want to build in an area in which Sidewalk Labs controls everything, from the land to the laws. I’m not convinced, but at least it’s a response.

Easier to prototype:

urban innovation often requires integration with the built environment, increasing the cost of prototyping, requiring greater coordination among more stakeholders, and making it difficult to test and commercialize early-stage concepts. It can be far more difficult to prototype a new system for flexible, rearrangeable walls in ground-floor retail space, than it is to test a new app on iOS. (p. 468)

But do you need to rearrange an entire neighbourhood to do it?

The tech-law connection:

urban innovation often requires close coordination with government and existing policy.

Sort of. Certainly they both affect each other, but testing doesn’t necessarily require that a city change its laws.

Take an innovation that is focused on creating more sustainable and cost-efficient street lights that provide brighter and safer night-time environments while using less power. Innovators often must coordinate with formal or informal authorities, even for early testing, to secure necessary input, buy-in, authorization, or permits. Coordination becomes more complicated and time-intensive as innovators move from testing to scale and as new stakeholders introduce additional constraints or complexities.

There are two problems with this example. First, it treats innovations as if they are completely neutral rather than something that can yield either positive or negative results.

Second, it assumes that laws that slow down innovations are an inefficiency to be overcome, when they often also protect existing public goods or interests (which may themselves be positive or negative).  For example, we would all be better off if we had had laws on the book to restrict or outlaw Google’s and Facebook’s innovations regarding targeted advertising. This innovation has made Facebook’s business (social media) sustainable, but at the cost of destabilizing democratic society and has contributed to an actual genocide.

Real-world consequences:

unlike other disciplines where innovators are encouraged to fail fast, urban innovation can have higher stakes. Changes to construction technologies that inadvertently compromise structural integrity are not acceptable — unsafe buildings have significant real-world consequences. The same holds true for self-driving vehicle testing and other innovations that operate in public space. (pp. 468-469)

This is the weirdest justification for ditching existing laws. These laws are in place to ensure that urban innovations (say, as they relate to building codes) are as safe as possible, and that unproven, only-beta-tested technologies don’t come on the market.

It’s doubly weird in this case, since Sidewalk Labs isn’t asking to create a Potemkin Safety Village (Ottawa Safety Village RIP) where it will be simulating a city; it wants to build an actual city in which real people will live. This is exactly the situation in which you want strict laws that restrict innovations, especially from companies based in a Silicon Valley culture, in which you can always fix the shittily made app after it’s gone to market.

To put it another way, Sidewalk Labs should be seeking to work within Toronto’s existing regulatory framework, not seeking to change it as it sees fit.

Strategy 2: Build on Toronto’s existing innovation ecosystem to grow the field (pp. 470-473; not listed in Table of Contents)

They would draw on university researchers (p. 470) in particular, although this section is more of a statement of where things stand in terms of tech employment and government support than a description of how they would build on the “existing innovation economy.”

Strategy 3: Create the physical, digital, and policy conditions for urban innovation (pp. 474-476; not listed in Table of Contents)

A restatement of its commitment to flexible physical spaces (in terms of buildings, roads and outdoor spaces) (p. 474) Also a restatement about data governance and connectivity (p. 475).

And a restatement about how it wants to redo “existing urban regulations and policies — such as zoning, building code, and automobile regulations” (p. 475):

These policies — designed around important objectives, such as protecting the public from industrial hazards or over-developing attractive residential areas — now sometimes limit the ability to find creative solutions to the very same problems they attempted to mitigate. Today’s digital capabilities enable these policies to achieve their intended outcomes in more flexible ways. (p. 475)

Although see my previous comments just about on why innovation is never a good in and of itself. Especially when you’re talking about an actual community filled with actual people. Rule changes are fine, but we have processes for changing them: go through democratically elected representatives. It’s bad form to try an end-run around these processes via a vague development proposal in concert with an organization with limited democratic accountability.

Make your case, out in the open, to Toronto City Council. Or the Province of Ontario. Or the Government of Canada.

Turning these rules over to a self-interested developer would be like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. It’s bad governance.

Strategy 4: Launch an Urban Innovation Institute as a portal for learning and research (p. 477-487; not listed in Table of Contents)

In which Sidewalk Labs (again; some of this text is repeated from p. 307 of this very Volume) make the case for a Google-linked, inter/multidisciplinary institute that could draw upon the data produced by the people and infrastructure in the IDEA District. It sees the Urban Innovation Institute eventually supporting collaborative degree programs with other institutions (universities? colleges?), and it envisions a close collaboration with Toronto-based institutions. It includes several imaginings of how all this could work (four out of 11 pages are devoted to these short stories, complemented by drawings that dwarf the actual text on these pages) – argumentation via sales job.

Anyways, the Urban Innovation Institute would pursue technological advances as well as governance approaches. In other words, it’s about policy and tech. Keeping in mind that technology isn’t neutral, two guesses about the outcomes its policy analyses would favour. As former prime minister Brian Mulroney once said, “You dance with the one who brung ya.”

Strategy 5: Establish a new venture fund for local, early-stage enterprises (pp. 488-489; not listed in Table of Contents)

In which mention is again made of Sidewalk Labs’ $10 million proposed investment into said fund.

With more advanced options for early-stage venture funding, Sidewalk Labs aims to help contribute to the region’s ability to retain talent and IP locally. (p. 489)

As I think I’ve already noted, the issue here isn’t location of the actual workers; it’s who controls the intellectual property. Simply developing local talent does nothing to ensure that intellectual property will stay in the country, especially when you have a foreign company at the centre of your cluster – who do you think will be the joint senior partner with many of these companies that Sidewalk Labs will be identifying?

If someone could explain to me how Sidewalk Labs’ plan would help to keep intellectual property in Canada, I’d love to hear from them.

Strategy 6: Benefit Toronto companies and catalyze new ones (pp. 490-492; not listed in Table of Contents)

In which Sidewalk Labs makes the case that projects undertaken in the IDEA district would contribute to existing Canadian/Ontario programs (e.g., on self-driving cars, cleantech)

That’s enough for now. See you in the next post, for Part 3, Chapter 3, Volume 1.